Nicola Stephenson as
Sara Hughes
Tom Sizemore as Katzenberg
Chris Potter as
Dan Abrams
J. R. Bourne as
Lance Resnick
Cas Anvar as Munish Loomba
Nicolas Wright as
Ralf DeWitt
Emily Tilson as Emily
Abrams
Jana Carpenter as
Holly Zabrieski
Superstorm
Genre docudrama
Written by
Julian Simpson
Directed by Julian Simpson
Starring
Nicola Stephenson
Tom Sizemore
Chris Potter
JR Bourne
Cas Anvar
Nicolas Wright
Jana Carpenter
Country of origin United Kingdom
No. of episodes 3
Superstorm is a three-part
British docudrama miniseries written and directed by Julian Simpson, about a group of scientists that try to divert and weaken hurricanes using cloud seeding.
Plot - The movie begins with a team of scientists working on a
US government project, known as Stormshield, whose goal is to control and manage storms, particularly hurricanes.
Hurricane Grace, a
Category 3 hurricane which is slowly climbing to a
Category 5, is up to hit the
United States. Using a predictive technology named
Tempest and developed by Lance Resznick, they are able to simulate the effects of seeding the storm in order to collapse the eye of the storm and then decrease its intensity.
Lance is openly sceptical towards the theories of Sara Hughes, an
English scientist who is convinced about the effectiveness of cloud seeding. An experiment is done on a smaller hurricane,
Agatha. A plane and several
UAV carrying the seeds (in this case, supercooled liquid) fly into the storm. At first, the experiment is a success but then the storm intensifies during the seeding and the plane crashes.
Weeks go by and
Grace has now become a category 5 hurricane, headed straight for
Miami. At the urgings of Katzenberg, the fund seeker of the project, the team formulates a plan of distant atmospheric perturbation to deflect Grace out into the
Atlantic Ocean by creating a low pressure system on the
Pacific coast and allowing it to be carried across the nation towards the hurricane.
While the team leader Abrams and mathematician Munish Loomba try to model the weather perturbation that will safely deflect Grace, Lance tells Sara that her attempt to change Agatha's course after the seeding was actually successful. Discussing such results with her grandfather, who was head of a similar, discredited project in the
1970s, Sara discovers that he and his team knew they could make hurricanes change course but made their efforts appear fruitless because they realized the military were behind the project, looking for ways to use weather as a weapon. The same turns out to be true for Stormshield, even if Katzenberg had previously assured that there was no military involvement.
Meanwhile the low pressure system approach has been finalized, with
B-52 bombers ready to release trails of carbon over the
West Coast. Just before proceeding with the operation, Lance states that the attempt must be stopped as another storm is moving up and could deflect Grace back into the
USA. Unimpressed, Katzenberg fires the whole team, who refuses to take such a high risk.
The team soon learns that the operation went on even if they did not provide the necessary data to the flying squad. The mole in the team turns out to be Bengali-born Munish, who lost his family in a hurricane while still a child and now desperate to make the theory of hurricane deflection work.
The other storm did deflect
Grace, now headed right for
New York City. After realizing that in the first experiment the course of Agatha was altered by the supercooling of the areas of the storm, the team decides to apply the same method. They manage to slightly deviate the storm away from New York City, thus causing smaller damage, but cannot avoid that
Long Island, where the Stormshield headquarters are located, is hit.
Sara is the only member of the team who survives without severe injuries and the series finishes with her about to either admit the terrible tragedy caused by their research or, as Katzenberg would want, lie to cover it up and suggest to the
American people and to the whole world that the technology did work and is to be expanded.
- published: 27 Aug 2015
- views: 435